Aspiring to excellence we can dream of fantastic workouts. But if we don’t have times and places in our lives for those workouts to happen and they will happen only in our imagination they will lead to only imaginary skills and an imaginary physique!
Build your “Practice Flow”!
If you want real skills and real health, you need to practice regularly. If you are aspiring to make progress, you can’t leave this to chance and whim. You need a plan. A practice plan. A simple “when and where” on a regular weekly basis you can fit in a workout. A regular, consistent, seemingly boring schedule of practice will lead to spectacular, inspiring progress and improvement. When you make a regular practice session part of the normal flow of your life, and it just keeps easily happening every week you have a “Practice Flow”.
Your practice flow will consistently produce breakthroughs and steady improvements you can be proud of. Figure out your practice flow and as the old saying goes “Take care of your practice, and your skill will take care of itself”.
Every time you practice, your skills and your physique build. Somedays you will have brilliant practice sessions and other days will be less energized or focused. The beauty of regular practice is that you make progress even on the low energy days and when those great days happen you make breakthroughs. Without the regular practice those wonder days of awesome workouts where you attain new levels of skill or ability, and experience epiphanies are rare. With regular practice they happen with regularity.
“Practice Flow” is how you consistently level up your skills and make major progress over the course of a year in learning an art. This is different from “getting some exercise”.
The next level is to turn “Practice Flow” into “Play Flow”. Decide to enjoy every part of your practice. Simply pretend to like every part of your practice, even the most difficult or challenging, until you start to love them. With an attitude of play, freely enjoying and engaging the natural brilliance of the present moment, everything becomes infinitely easier and better, and we access our highest learning and performance capabilities. When you can play with your art, not merely practice it, but freely and easily express yourself, your enjoyment of your art blossoms and your art becomes profound.
Lovely photos! They inspire me to make a Practice Flow. Thank you.